People frequently attend professional conferences for the purpose of networking which may include meeting with known colleagues as well as making new contacts. When meeting new contacts, it is customary to exchange business cards and other information, for example. These professional conferences may, however, be attended by thousands of people and the event spread out across a large conference hall, or multiple conference halls. It becomes difficult to meet known colleagues, and even more challenging to identify new people of interest, because the probability of encountering these people goes down as the size of the event increases. It is quite possible to be standing meters away from a colleague and be completely unaware of the colleague's presence because we rely so heavily on visional contact to make contact with colleague. While it is possible to use email, for example, to pre-arrange a time and place to meet a colleague, this solution does not scale well for a number of reasons. First, each meeting must be arranged individually, which becomes very cumbersome if one intends to meet a large number of people. Second, any pre-arrange meeting may turn out to actually conflict with presentations being offered at the professional conference. Third, a person may not even know whether or not a colleague with which they wish to meet is even attending the professional conference. For the foregoing reasons there is, therefore, a need for a system that enables people to effectively “discover”, i.e., “detect”, when colleagues are present at a professional gathering or other large event without relying on visual contact or email, enables people to make new connections with people of interest, and automatically exchanges professional information between those people with little or no manual data entry.